~ Runnin' 'Round in My Mind

I’ve realized while binge-watching this season’s “Jane the Virgin” how much I love Gina Rodriguez who plays the lead character “Jane”. Her facial expressions alone from her mouth to her eyes, her nose, her eyebrows, she displays such great expressionism. Sometimes her expressions crumple into a teary mess of liquid, her mouth downturning.

No matter. She’s absolutely beautiful and funny and just all-around fantastic in this role.

So with this season, I thought, “did she gain weight?” because something looked a little different about her. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then, instinctively, I was going to Google that very topic, but I stopped. Is that REALLY important? I admire this woman, the character she’s playing and how she’s playing her. She’s made me care about Jane, a fictional being on the small screen, along with all of the other cast of characters. Maybe it’s my eyes. Yes, my eyes need checking. And even if it’s not, even if she gained 10 pounds, 20, 30….does it matter? And my answer is absolutely not. It wouldn’t change how I feel about the character or about Gina Rodriguez herself. And I started to take a look at the diversity of the show. It’s pretty good. But when I look at the women on the show, they are all of various shapes, sizes, heights, weights, short-waisted, low-waisted, long-legged, short-legged, and so on.

It just proves my point that every human being…or in this case, the ones playing those characters…have intrinsic value and those same human beings have flaws, too. But the physical flaws…they’re only flaws if we choose to see them that way.

I refuse to play a part in that societal norm of what is normal looking.

So no Googling anyone’s weight anymore. It would be wasted effort on my part because it adds no value about the people playing those characters or the characters themselves.

***SPOILER ALERT*** AGAIN, ***SPOILER ALERT*** AND ONCE MORE, PAST THIS POINT ***SPOILER ALERT***

And Michael? What the you-know-what were the writers thinking? And I’m the writers’ biggest fan. But on that night, I wanted to make the writers rewrite the episode, on a chalkboard, 100 times until they learned their lesson to never write a show like that again.

I’ve seen it twice, and cried both times. Stupid writers. *huffs off, stomping all the way, head down, arms crossed tightly around body*

Like this:

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” ~J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling didn’t originate the idea of the quote, and the quote in various forms has been around since probably the 1700s or so, it’s a recurring theme in the Harry Potter novels.

Lately, I’ve experienced the meaning of this quote on many levels to the point where I just want to say to certain people, “Fuck off, you wankers”, and yet I feel constricted by my own upbringing, my own issues, and societal norms. So I don’t.

It makes me want to do something better with my writing, something with more purpose, or perhaps, to do it with people who actually care about other people. I can absorb cussing, outright yelling, (most of the time), off-colour jokes, blue comedy, and all the other types of shit that comes out of humans’ mouths.

What I hate, abhor, is when someone is so uncaring, manipulative, and downright subtle with their evil plans to destroy a person’s confidence, self-esteem, self-worth, even if to destroy those things for another human in the moment.

What the fuck IS that? And why, WHY do women seem to be the ones I observe who mostly do this? And why do they do it mostly to each other?

On a side note, I’ve discovered something else in my recent project: millennials are pure crap at managing others. The reason they do? They don’t care. And people drive everything, not machines, not technology, not deadlines. To motivate people, you have to first care about them.

So imagine you don’t care and are delivering news to someone about not meeting certain expectations. Imagine that, because you haven’t gotten to know the person at all because again, you don’t care, that when you deliver the news, factually and without compassion, you have no idea that the person has a history of depression. Imagine again that because you don’t care, and because you are a soulless human being who only cares about the work and not the people involved, that the person is now suicidal. Imagine that the person dies because, although not the specific root cause of why, you are the immediate cause of the person’s suicide.

Imagine not caring enough to find out what has happened when the person doesn’t show up for an important meeting. What if the person lives alone, doesn’t have any true friends, and is in a very solo profession? So you don’t check on the person. Because you don’t care.

Imagine a world of depressed people walking the planet, feeling alone, and one interaction, even if necessary but negative and done in a cruel way, could be the immediate cause of someone’s suicide.

If you were even remotely uncomfortable with reading the word suicide, you should be. People don’t like the word. About every 15 minutes, a person commits suicide. That’s about 4 people every hour. And for each person who commits suicide, another handful of people are seriously affected by it.

So if someone tells you they have been suicidal in the past or that that they suffer from depression or both, listen to them. Stop doing what you’re doing and listen to them. Show compassion. Show caring.

Otherwise, imagine when you are at the lowest point in your life and look back at who you have helped along the way, who you have listened to, who you have treated fairly and compassionately, only to discover that you have treated no one that way. Imagine that even the people you thought loved you the most have finally had enough of the way you’ve treated them, too, and imagine that at that lowest point, you have no one. Because you are an asshole, a total, and complete bitch. You have treated others in a way that is not even becoming of any human being. You are absolutely worthless, which is interesting considering that is how someone who commits suicide feels.

Like this:

My heart is heavy, too, concaving my chest so that nothing is left in it anymore…not feeling, not love, not sadness…nothing.

My eyelids refuse to cooperate with me, slowly and sneakily closing more often and covering more of my eyes’ real estate so that by the time I finish this brief blog post, I will be writing it blindly.

My body feels bound to the earth somehow, not that I can’t fly, but that I can’t even crawl.

I want to lay down until all thoughts make a final pass through my frenzied brain, until my brain is clear and clean and ready to start fresh, with no trace of data from before.

And the frenzy within my brain is whirring, buzzing, furiously leaping from thought to thought, it as if I’m trying to catch air.

On the outside, heavy is what I feel. My body is heavy. My mind is heavy. My spirit is heavy.

Like this:

I’ve never had the feeling of NOT wanting to read. I’ve always read, even in some of my darkest times, I’ve always been reading a book, and at times, when my thoughts were scattered and I was indecisive because of my depression, I may have been reading more than one book at a time.

But I’ve never lost the passion for reading until now.

It’s weird. So weird. I can’t say I’ve lost it completely. Maybe once a week, I’ll pick up the most current book I’ve been in and have read a couple of pages.

But usually, I read through pages with passion, even with books I’m not as invested in or not very intrigued by. Lately, that’s not the case.

Has this ever happened to you?

And what can make this change, recapture my spirit for the written word? It might be that I’ve been spending so much time writing that I’m tired of the written word. I’m not quite sure. Instead of writer’s block, I have reader’s block.

Is that such a thing? I don’t know, but it must be. At least for me it is.

And it’s sad. I feel riddled with guilt.

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Sometimes…
I can’t handle the news.
I can’t hear one more piece of information
About death, evil, destruction, and doom.
I can’t bear one more audible assault on my ears of howling, hurting, and madness.
I can’t stand tall when all I want to do is crawl, crawl far, far down, into that deep, dark hole, where all I want to do is sleep
Until the evil in the world subsides, fades away, at least from my sight and my ears
And no more of God’s creatures are in pain,
No more of God’s creatures are slain
For color, religion, sex, or power.
Instead, I sleep in that deep, dark hole until peace washes over all of God’s creatures
Including me.

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This is one of my favorite poems, and I typically do not like poetry. It’s the musical equivalent of jazz. It makes no sense and while people say they love it, it’s only because they think others think they should.

From God is No Fool by Lois A. Cheney

Bits and pieces, bits and pieces.

People.

People important to you,

People unimportant to you cross your life, touch it with love and move on.

There are people who leave you and you breathe a sigh of relief and wonder why you ever came into contact with them.

There are people who leave you, and you breathe a sigh of remorse and wonder why they had to go and leave such a gaping hole.

Children leave parents, friends leave friends.

Acquaintances move on.

People change homes.

People grow apart.

Enemies hate and move on.

Friends love and move on.

You think of the many people who have moved in and out of your hazy memory.

You look at those present and wonder.

I believe in God’s master plan in our lives.

God moves people in and out of each other’s lives, and each leaves a mark on the other.

You find you are made up of bits and pieces of all who have ever touched your life.

You are more because of them, and would be less if they had not touched you.

Pray that you accept the bits and pieces in humility and wonder, and never question and never regret.

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“ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and it refers to a phenomenon which is very difficult to explain to those that do not experience it. It is usually experienced through a relaxing tingling in the scalp and the back of the neck and can extend into the rest of the body. It is a very calming sensation that washes over you.” ~ASMRLab.com

Lately, I’ve been listening to things that produce ASMR for me to help me sleep (in addition to the sleep medication I’m already taking).

Quite a long time ago, when I was working with 3-year-old children, many times, a couple of them wanted to read a book to me. Of course, they couldn’t quite read yet, and the books they picked out were always far beyond their years in comprehension. Nevertheless, they read their books to me. One of them, Thomas, would sit next to me, reading the book aloud to me (whilst looking down at each page as if he were really reading to the book itself). Thomas had a bit of a lisp at the time. He may have outgrown it now. He would turn the page every now and then, sometimes quizzing me for my own comprehension. So many times, though, I would immediately fall into what I called at the time a “zone”. It was this sort of transcendental state of mind that completely relaxed me, my eyelids rolling down heavy like the wooden cover on a roll-top desk. I never understood why I had that reaction.

Then a few months ago, my aunt was giving my uncle a face massage. He was in the hospital, and she was just wanting to help him sleep because he’d been a bit agitated. I sat in a chair in the corner of his hospital room, watching her talk to his nurse while still giving him a facial massage the entire time. And again, that meditative, relaxing feeling washed over me like warm water being poured slowing onto the top of your head.

As a writer, I haven’t wanted to write about this “hooey” because it just seems hokey, as some friends of mine from the southern US would say. How on earth could watching my aunt give my uncle a facial massage have the same effect on me that a three-year-old did when he was “reading” a book to me?

After the incident with my aunt giving my uncle a facial massage, I decided one night, when I couldn’t sleep, to search YouTube for someone else giving someone a facial massage. Sure enough, there were a ton of video results. So each night, I usually listen to one of them or more. I started noticing that ASMR popped up in so many of these videos, that finally, tonight, I looked up what it really is. Apparently, not all people have a reaction to these “triggers” (sounds or motions I should say).

I’m just glad I know a name that might fit this kind of phenomenon. It’s the cheapest sleep therapy ever.